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Your eating once or twice at the above places means absolutely nothing when compairing it to how much a hot meal means to troopers deployed at a firebase or post in the middle of nowhere for an extended period of time. Again you show just what an idiot you are when it comes to the lives of servicemembers and should just shut the fuck up on the subject...and on anything about the military as well.

What he not telling us is that he ate at the food court at those places. If he was ever really there at all.

Hardly. Privatizing military functions leads to decreased costs in peacetime, but increased costs in wartime. For example, most units had cooks assigned at the company level, so that field feeding was done at a relatively small cost, but the bean counters in the 90's decided that they could eliminate those positions as part of the total drawdown of the force, and make it up with consolidated DFACs throughout CONUS. It did save money, but when we ramped up for Iraq, those positions didn't come back, and we had to establish the same kind of DFACs throughout theater, with combat pay for the civilians who run them. The various contractors managed to find Third Country Nationals (TCNs) to run them at lower cost, but the overall cost was still higher than paying Soldiers to do it, expecially when the cooks ended up being needed to oversee the operaions.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

Still doesn't change the fact that the article doesn't contain anything to suggest that President Obama had anything to do with the decision to cut back on hot food service.

Uh, no. From the article:

Officials stressed other comforts at the forward operating bases may also soon be reduced, such as laundry and recreation, as officials look for other ways to reduce the American footprint in advance of departing the country.

“In order to set the conditions for each base closure or a base transfer, non-tactical logistics and support services (i.e. any non-mission essential services) must decline. Typically the complete cessation of non-tactical logistics and services, such as laundry services or morale, welfare and recreation services, occurs 2-3 months prior to a base closure or transfer,” Lt. Col. Paul Haverstick said.

If they want to cut costs...they need to start at places like Kandahar and Kabul where you have 6-7 DFACS in addition to fast food vendors...before they start cutting services at the forward areas.

Except that the FOBs are the first to shut down in this kind of drawdown and it costs more to run food service out there. The economy of scale for having multiple DFACs in one location is significant, especially when you factor in the way that drawn down units will go through those big bases when they redeploy. This isn't about saving money. Democrats don't care about that. It's about demonstrating that we are subordinate to them and punishing the troops.